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- Picturing the Internet in 1981
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- Core tenets of the social web
- Cut the cord
- Honoring the debt Canada’s connectivity owes to Chinese workers
- Custom URL shorteners put the poetry back in domain names
- 25 rules of social media netiquette
- 6 ways to beat time zones with technology
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- How my custom URL shortener taught me the 10 principles of tech support
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- 7 rules for rule-breakers
- 1972: ELIZA, IANA and the search for (in)finite attention online
- Online innovators turn foresight into insight
- Finding the soul of the web in HTML
- 7 lessons about our online future from our online past
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- The 9 secrets of a successful marriage (to a web application like Evernote)
- Why we need to remember life before the Internet
- The Lonely Princess: A Social Media Fairy Tale
- 8 ways writers can make the most of online video
- What we can learn from delicious and the tagging revolution
- 6 web technologies that don’t suck anymore
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- What you choose when you choose a network
- Looking back to predict the future of the Internet
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- 6 resources for learning about Internet history
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- Real innovators don’t hold grudges
- Are you using the Internet to monetize or to enlighten?
- Blacksburg reminds us how to worry about our kids
- One 40-year-old looks back on the Internet, c. 1971
“Free, open and participatory” is the social web’s equivalent to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That’s what I argue in the latest installment of One 40-year-old, which appears today on the Harvard Business Review site. My latest post looks at a 1987 controversy over the structure of Usenet (news groups), known as the Great Renaming. All those years ago, you could see the principles that would shape today’s social web:
It should come as no surprise that we expect the web to be free, open and participatory: after all, these are words that are widely bandied about in discussions of social media best practices and business 2.0. But it’s crucial to recognize that these principles are no passing fad, invented by us as a result of some Facebook spat or Verizon business decision. Nor are they the high hopes of a new and idealistic medium. In fact, they’re the same principles that have always bubbled to the surface on the social Web, even a quarter-century ago with the Great Renaming.
You can read more about how these principles played out in 1987, and how they’re playing out today, inĀ The Core Tenets of the Social Web, 25 years in the making.
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